 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Logan Larson, Justin Pruitt, Mike Aikens, and we've got a couple new patrons that came in just before the bell, Richard, Jeffrey, and Bob. On this episode of DTNS, the Reddit versus Mod Saga marches on. Twitter has a new monetary strategy, not everybody thinks is all that great. And Dr. Niki explains why black holes do more and need to be thanked, maybe. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 29, 2023. From Studio Secret Bunker, I'm Sarah Lane. From the loveliest Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Richard Raffaleno. It's 100 degrees in Alabama and I'm Dr. Niki Ackermans. I am the show's producer, Roger Chang. Well, Dr. Niki, we hope you've got a AC or a fan or some other reason to keep cool. The southern states are really getting hit, aren't they? It's melty, yeah. It is kind of melty. Well, let's see if we're melting after we start with a quick heads. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that if given the chance, he'd get rid of the entire exclusives on consoles. But he also admits it's not really up to him since Sony is the dominant player in the console's industry and has defined the market and competition. These comments came by way of testimony in the case of FTC versus Microsoft. You might recall, and we've talked about it on the show, that the Federal Trade Commission has sought a restraining order to block Microsoft from closing at $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard. Arguments in this case are expected to wrap today as if this recording, they may have wrapped. Well, Nikkei Asia reports that TSMC plans to send more than 500 workers from Taiwan to Arizona to speed up construction of its chip plant they're building there. Construction of TSMC's first US plant has fallen behind schedule and in part due to labor shortages. Kotaku acquired an internal email sent to Niantic employees today, Thursday, that the company is closing its Los Angeles studio in a move to slow in-house game development, or perhaps shudder it entirely. Not so sure about that yet, this is the developing story. But this does include laying off 230 employees, pumping the brakes on NBA All World, which Niantic was working on, and canceling its upcoming Marvel World of Heroes game. Niantic founder Josh Hanke says this is in response to the studio's expenses growing faster than its revenue. The Digital Ads Analysis Group, Adalytics reports that it found hundreds of thousands of websites and apps where YouTube ads play in the background without sound and on an automatic loop, seemingly racking of views. Now some of you may say thank you. You didn't want to see those ads anyway, but the ads aren't actually skipped. In at least some cases, the advertiser thinks the ads are being viewed and the strategy violates Google's terms. Google denies the practice telling advertisers its choice-based ad format is based on a user watching either a full clip or at least 30 seconds of it. If the ad is skipped, an advertiser doesn't pay, so it's a key difference there. YouTube would say that. Interesting issues here. These are good ones, at least for Snap. Axios reports that Snapchat announced that its subscription service, Snapchat Plus, has reached 4 million paid subscribers in its first year. Snapchat says it plans to roll out new features to the Plus subscribers in the coming weeks, such as customized chat messages. Alright, let's talk about Twitter. This could be good news or bad news, depending on where you land. Alright, so let's talk about the Financial Times sources reporting that, according to a meeting that was held earlier this month, Twitter CEO, Linda Jacarino, laid out a plan to woo back some advertisers who previously had left the platform. The platform relies on advertisers for money. This reportedly includes a video ad service, specifically full-screen sound-on video ads that would be served to users scrolling through Twitter's new short video feed. That would be a money-making situation. Plans also include new media partners and publishers and talent agencies that could possibly secure content from celebrities or political figures, content creators that are very popular. So, Rich, for anybody scratching their heads on what is Twitter doing, where would this exactly show up? Yeah, well, Twitter launched a TikTok-style short video feed last week, and this new ad format would apparently be part of this new feature. Now, Jacarino is also reportedly looking to invest in rebuilding Twitter's advertising sales and partnership teams following reduction in around 80% of Twitter's overall workforce over the past year. Those teams certainly are not exempt from those job cuts, so looking to build those back up. The new CEO is said to be presenting her ideas using Twitter Spaces. That's Twitter's audio feature in the first week of August, so potentially getting some more details in about a little over a month. Jacarino has been Twitter CEO for just under a month now. Nikki, you've kind of been playing around with some of the other Twitter-like social options out there. I'm curious, what are your thoughts about Twitter's long-term bet here? Yeah, that's right. I've been over on Blue Sky for a little bit. I'm still on Twitter and kind of just observing from afar. But the feeling I think that everyone has is that Twitter kind of needs to get their act together, and they have to make money somehow. Nobody's excited about ads, but if this is a way to kind of seamlessly incorporate it, why not give it a go? It's one of those things where you're going to have to just sit back and watch and see what happens. If they don't overdo it like they've been doing with the sort of text ads that come in into comments now, I believe, as well. So it might be a lot. I would wait and see. Since Tweetbot went away, RIP Tweetbot, over the last, I don't know, seven months or so of a lot of third-party Twitter apps going away. And we'll talk about third-party apps in a minute when we talk about Reddit. But there are weird things that already happen in Twitter's native app. And I'm talking about macOS because that's the one that I use the most. Where there's autoplay, video stuff, where I'm like, I didn't want this and it's disruptive or even embarrassing kind of thing. Okay, those aren't even advertisements. That's just sort of like an app acting weird. In a way where I'm like, if I just had some sort of setting option to say never do that without me knowing, fine. It kind of plays into the conversation or what you told us before, Rich, about YouTube also saying like, yeah, well, advertisers, things happen behind the scenes. I think companies are well aware that users hate this stuff. Users do not want this. Advertisers will pay for it if they think that it's worth their while. And boy, Twitter has its work cut out for it. Yeah, I mean, every user says they don't like ads. But for a successful ad product, I always go back to Instagram because I do feel like they have the most compelling ad product on the market. They click through a lot of Instagram ads. They are highly effective. Even if you gave me a choice, I would say, yes, of course, I would not like ads. I still find them very effective. So effective ads, I feel like users will put up with. And when we're talking about this kind of, you know, this full screen autoplay ads, at first blush, when you're thinking of like the regular, you know, Twitter feed experience, that may say, oh my gosh, that's horrible. But when we're looking at it in a TikTok format, YouTube shorts, TikTok has had the, you know, YouTube shorts had us for over a year, TikTok has had us for forever. That's like the accepted format in that template. And what's important here in all of the covers that we've seen from this, both in the Financial Times and from the New York Times, is when they're talking kind of to the overall ad tech industry, that Jacarino has this reputation of like brings instant credibility to this from an advertiser perspective. She's been doing this a long time. Yeah. Yeah. And like, but like some of the quotes would be like, this will be a like a top tier product if she is behind it. There are some of like the quotes that we saw in specifically in the Financial Times piece. And so I definitely think that speaks to the advertiser side of this, right? Obviously, all of this is contingent on continuing content moderation, continuing, you know, building out of product from a company that's, you know, been gutted from a lot of its staff and stuff like that. There's still a lot of what ifs there. In terms of this specific format, it's whether to be seen, you know, everybody rolling out an identical feature of this is TikTok, but for our platform, there's some fatigue with that, but we've certainly seen stories kind of have some persistent across a number of different platforms. Now, you know, Twitter doesn't have the same user base as a lot of these, but that's an accepted format. Those ads are accepted by its users. Honestly, I think the bigger question is, you know, YouTube's art is just going to be spinning up its rev share program with creators and his partner program for this. TikTok is very famously figuring out ways to share revenue, you know, for people that are getting views and stuff like that. That to me is the bigger question is how do you entice creators to get on board with this new format? Yeah, I think the ad tech will, you know, Jacarina knows how to build out these teams and that on a product side, that will be fine. Well, and this was a question, you know, people were having a couple of years ago when Instagram was supposedly, you know, aping TikTok's model and doing its own thing and it sort of like, here's meta added again, just copying another platform, but had quite a bit of success. Like you said, Rich, you know, Instagram, Instagram is good at what it does and has been good at adding the so-called TikTok like content to its platform. In fact, I gotta be honest, I'm not really going to TikTok all that often anymore. And it's not because there's not good content there. It's just because I have too many places to find it and I'm already on Instagram. Yeah. So, you know, if Twitter can do that and get enough eyeballs to make advertisers pay, then, you know, maybe not the worst idea in the world, but also not really reinventing much. All right. Well, as Twitter protests continue over high API fees, Reddit has given closed communities a deadline to reopen or be in violation of rule four of the code of conduct regarding being active and engaged as a moderator. We've been covering this for a while since, you know, all the API hubbub came about. This seems to be definitely another development there. At that point, Reddit could suspend the moderators and transfer the subreddit to someone else either in the moderation team or appointing new mods. Meanwhile, a post from a Reddit user named Sliced Lime, who appears to be Minecraft Java, a Minecraft Java tech lead, announced that Mojang will no longer post official content to Reddit in response to the protest. And in one other related note, Apple Insider is among those urging users of the third party Apollo Reddit reader app to decline their refunds to help offset their expenses. Apollo is shutting down after Reddit's new API fees. We have covered that quite a bit in the saga that they've been going through. Yeah, indeed. And the whole declining refunds has a lot to do with, you know, an app developer saying, we can't do this anymore, but we've put so much money into it. If you could decline your refund, that would help help us unless you're particularly mad at us for some reason. But the story gets a little bit more interesting. The Verges J. Peters notes, the Reddit's API changes haven't eliminated all third party apps. There are some that are hanging on several popular clients are facing June 30 shutdowns. But apps like Narwhal, multi tab for Reddit, infinity for Reddit, relay for Reddit, all plan to switch to subscription only offerings. That means they get more money to keep doing what they want to do. This is on top of apps that are receiving accessibility exemptions for API pricing. That is a little bit different. Those include Red Reader and also Luna. Okay, so Rich, let's assume Reddit isn't going to back down on the API stuff, but seems, you know, they seem to be holding the line on that one. I'm shocked they haven't walked this back because of the Reddit community strength in general. I'm missing something. I can only go by what CEO Steve Huffman has done and kind of saying this is the hill that I am going to die on on this, right? I am not going to give an inch, maybe give an inch. They made some exemptions for accessibility apps, laudable to keep those resources out there. However, basically not moving when it comes to pricing is either that this is a extraordinarily principled stance and that this just goes against something in Huffman's character that he cannot abide by or that he is being given no choice either through investor pressures ahead of an IPO or in some sort of perceived need to have their financials in a certain state and for whatever reason the infrastructure costs or something associated with third party access to these APIs unpaid access to these APIs kind of goes against that. What the most significant development of this is this is kind of the first I'm hearing of and credit to the verge for pointing this out that there are a few third party apps that are at least trying to make the switch to subscriptions. I'm curious kind of what what your take is on kind of this latest development here that we're seeing from Reddit. It's interesting. I'm a Reddit user so I've seen the different subs blackout as this has been going on. One of the questions is where would people go if they're not going to be using these third party apps anymore. And some people are saying that Reddit could be banking on the fact that it doesn't have a direct competitor yet that would take up these users. But yeah, maybe they're waiting for better apps to come out. We don't know. Yeah, I like I'm thinking of this in terms of like forum drama and usually like what happens in forum drama is everybody picks up their tent and they go to another forum but like by throwing the like the mod hand grenade into this whole situation here like that is the ultimate like forum drama that you could possibly do at scale with you know hundreds or dozens or I don't know how many subreddits but a lot. And yes, there are there are nascent ones like discord for example is is you know bringing out forum features and that kind of thing. It is not you're right is not the same yet. And this may be a situation where we have to do a lot of unpopular things to get ready for this IPO so let's yank all these bandaids off at the same time. You're talking to you know that Reddit has been you know supposedly looking at an IPO later in 2023. At the same time, you know that the idea that Reddit doesn't really have anything like Reddit that other people will go to was not true that long ago, you know it used to be dig versus Reddit. Yeah, you know and it was sort of like oh well dig was sort of you know what this was, or you had you know, news groups or you know all sorts of, you know other forms that you could be a part of. And then Reddit kind of came on the scene and just sort of worked. It had the stickiness that communities liked, and that's why Reddit has thrived over the last decade plus. And for the back you know for the company now to sort of be like, yeah well you know, not a pair play type thing, you know that is no surprise that it's kind of, you know, turn off a lot of people. But this whole kind of Reddit blackout thing and the company not folding. I am surprised by that. And I will also say I think seeing what happened to Twitter and kind of the the the mastodon migration that we saw I think is illustrative because yes, mastodon was a it was a mature was a fairly mature product that a lot of people could easily jump onto in a much more or just as divisive situation right as was happening to Twitter as is happening to Reddit right now, and they did see a huge spike in users, but Twitter is still there it's still standing. And I feel like Huffman saw that and goes, there is no as mature thing yes some people may choose to go somewhere else and stuff like that. But right now, I can make this move I don't hold the power and down the brush. It's like where are you going to go. I don't want it to go away. You know, we we I have a feeling we will be talking about this conversation for weeks to come, but we do not want you to go away from our Patreon in fact we need more patrons to reach our goal of having Molly would on the show one Friday per month. We can do it. And we know we can because of you. Many of you have not only stepped in as new patrons but also increased your pledges as existing patrons. We see you. We thank all of you. Thank you so much. We are close enough to have Molly would on the show this Friday that is tomorrow as it was recording and we're very excited to have her. But we do need more patrons to have Molly once a month on a Friday from then on. If you want to know more about it, want to make a pledge, make Molly Fridays happen at patreon.com. Well, we have some big news from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for gravitational waves. You might know it as nano grab it's for the casual usage my personal favorite nanohertz observatory. They've announced the first evidence for expected low frequency gravitational waves that were likely generated by the collision of super massive black holes. Nicky, I am going to hand the baton to you to explain kind of what the give some background on this and and why this is so such a big deal. Yeah, it is a super massive deal. If you may allow me to pun. Basically, we just have a brand new way of looking at space. So there's a lot to take in, but to explain it I'm going to kind of zoom down into a smaller scale. Down on earth, we actually have a gravitational wave detector and it's called LIGO. It has two arms that are perpendicular to each other and they're each three miles long. So the way it detects gravitational waves is that when one of those passes through it deforms space and time, and it makes one of the perpendicular arms a little bit shorter a little bit longer by about the width of a proton. But because this detector is relatively small on the scale of our universe even though on earth it's pretty big. It doesn't work, but it's not ideal for detecting gravitational waves and it can in quotes, only really detect black hole collisions which is cool but scientists were wanted more is not cool enough apparently. So so LIGO is good for detecting like just the biggest of the big gravitational waves just kind of do do, I guess, the limits of being on earth. So I guess a three mile long arms, you know, don't detect smaller ones. How did nanograph find them. The opposite. LIGO can detect certain sizes of waves, but we would like to detect even bigger waves. We need even bigger arms to do that and we can only build arms, you know, as big as the planet so much so the new announcement is basically how for the last 15 years, we've been using radio telescopes at the opposite ends of the Milky Way to create a giant gravitational wave detector. So for 15 years researchers have been working on this and they've been doing it by observing stars that flash once a millisecond and these are called pulsars. You've probably been hearing about this in the news. If you're following the science news like me all about pulsars they just flash once a millisecond. And basically when a gravitational wave passes above or around a pulsar, it kind of changes the rate at which it flashes, and we can measure that and so scientists have just been measuring these flashes for 15 years and hoping that something comes out of it. I mean, you know, with an educated guess. And it works out pretty well. So this method is much better at detecting than LIGO, because most of the sizes of these waves are the size of our entire universe so you need a really big detector. And the hope is that we can detect gravitational waves that happened milliseconds after the big bang. So it's pretty big deal. Wow. So they've had like 15 years of universe size wave data that just sounds like, like, like how do you even start to work through that and kind of make sense of that like this sounds like a universe size problem. It's a lot and there are lots of gravitational wave detector arrays and programs across different countries in the world. But scientists, of course, we love getting tons of data because that means that we have tons of questions to ask about it. So it's not a problem to have lots of data. But you can think about it in a specific way. So the researchers that are working on this project have to sift through a lot of data and a lot of background noise that is coming from this array to even begin to understand it. And Dr. McLaughlin of West Virginia University explains this by saying, imagine that it's an entire symphony of black holes. And the researchers are teasing out the sound of each instrument, so each black hole, and then sprinkle in a few additional instruments that we've never heard of before. So that's about what they're working on right now. And surprisingly, this background noise is about twice as strong as predicted. And we don't really know why, but it could be because there's either way more black holes than predicted or they're way bigger than predicted. So, okay, we've detected waves for the first time, pretty cool. But if background noise is stronger than originally predicted, what would you say, Nikki, or other new areas of research that we can go to from this finding? Yeah, so next to the background noise being a really interesting part of this discovery, there's also the fact that this data, because it's from so long ago, I guess you could say, or so far away, depending on how you look at the space time continuum, it will actually allow us to test our current standard model of physics, basically our current theory about how the universe is and how it works. But it's very difficult to test now, but because we have this information from around the time of the Big Bang, we might be able to actually confirm this theory, which is huge in the world of physics. So people are really excited. Yeah, sometimes when we're talking about space, physics, that kind of stuff, you'll see something come up, like this is one of those stories where I've seen kind of universal excitement, like no pun intended, excitement over, and this is such a huge deal. I just love in physics, it's like creativity about how we can measure something so far away so long ago, so massive, is always just super fascinating. Yeah, people have been hyping this up for days and Hank Green in particular has been all over it and I credit a little bit of the finding out about this and the explanation to him because he's been tweeting about it like crazy. All right, we've got some other exciting science here on a much smaller scale. You know, we've seen things like reconstructing images from eye reflections, but mostly in contrived plot devices from an episode of CSI. It doesn't mean it's not possible though and researchers from the University of Maryland are trying. They released a new study and it showed that researchers were able to take light reflections off of a human eye using several high resolution images from a fixed position camera. Zooming in on the reflections it's unclear if these are enhanced. The researchers calculated where the eyes were looking using neural radiance fields the researchers were able to reconstruct a discernible environment in a controlled setting. They incorporated a very dream like images but definitely with discernible details. Real world tests however produced much more nebulous gray blobs you're kind of guessing what you were actually seeing if you didn't already know the controlled environment. One of the issues that the complex nature of the human iris adds in a lot of noise to the process it's like a textured surface you don't think of it like that but it is a team more than that using it in an unconstrained setting will be challenging to further develop do things like lower resolution cameras, dynamic range on these cameras and motion blur but hey we can we can zoom and enhance and we can see the room in maybe someday a little closer to CSI reality. I mean Nicky I gotta ask because you know as a contact where like my human eye is piss poor but you know when I've got my contacts in or I'm wearing glasses all better you know does that play into this. So I like that rich early put an emphasis on in a controlled environment because my first thought went to like yeah this works in their specific experimental setting but the second you change the lighting you change the amount of cloud cover you change the type of camera. It doesn't work anymore and I'm sure adding glasses and contacts would change that especially since some contacts will literally change the angle of your eye and I'm sure that throws all of that off. You know credit to the scientists that like this is a cool first step, and I'm sure it's really fun to write articles about it so it probably gets overblown a little bit. But, but yeah I'm sure you know as things advance maybe they can use some machine learning to kind of make this better but they're going to need a lot of data input from a lot of situations to get this to work but maybe we'll get there and they should include people with contacts and people with glasses. Actually this has got me thinking of a product category if this ever becomes commercialized you could have like privacy preserving contact lenses that your reflections and stuff like stars in them and stuff. Or you could project your own reflection that you want. Especially you know with you know the whole big foot by your groceries where it's like maybe with limitations that kind of thing. I think we'll be talking about that a lot more going forward. Well, Dr. Nikki Ackerman's always so good to have you on the show. Let folks know what you're doing when you're not with us. You know I always love being here and when I'm not with you I'm researching at the University of Alabama and you can find out all about what I'm doing at nickleackermans.com that's my website. And like I said I'm still on Twitter at Ackerman's Nicole and I'm testing out blue sky I keep wanting to call it blue ski at a nickleackermans at bskoi.social. If you want to hit me up there the science community there is small but adorable is about how I've characterized it at this point. It's small and adorable. You know it's a good place to talk to. Not toxic yet. Yeah, Nikki's all over the place. If you missed any of that we will definitely have her links in our show notes. But just a reminder patrons do stick around because we have an extended show Good Day Internet where we're going to be talking about how easy it is for a multi-billion dollar company to leak company secrets using a sharpie pen. You think I'm kidding. I am not. But just a reminder you can catch us show Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC and you can find out more at DailyTechnoShow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow. That's Friday with Molly Wood. It's our first Molly Friday. Don't miss it. Len Feralta will be with us as well. Thanks for listening. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program.